Thin Ice
2018 · 11m
Directed by Joosje Duk
Tones: contemplative, tense
An ice-rink lost-and-found worker grows convinced that a man carrying a backpack is planning something dangerous.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A paranoia thriller set in an ice rink's lost-and-found is admirably weird premise-wise, but the execution plays it too straight—it needed to lean harder into the absurdity of surveillance anxiety in such a mundane space, or it risks becoming exactly the conventional slow-burn thriller everyone's already seen.
Duk demonstrates formal control in the sustained tension and framing choices, though the film sits somewhat uneasily between psychological thriller and social drama without quite committing to either tradition; the contemplative pacing suggests ambitions beyond genre that the narrative doesn't quite earn.
The decision to anchor this in the worker's interior uncertainty rather than external plot mechanics—letting the backpack remain genuinely ambiguous through mise-en-scène and reaction shots rather than confirmation—is the single choice that transforms routine thriller material into something genuinely unsettling and human.